Sterling Reviews

Imagine the biggest bore or show off you have ever had the misfortune to be waylaid by in a plane or at a party. Now you've got the idea of this book. Apparently, the writers, instead of sharing their travel and food adventures, engage in a sort of "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, I've been to Timbuktu and you haven't," monologue. Since the Travelers' Tales series books are usually pretty good, this was disappointing. An example of how very bad it was, in one article about bad road coffee, in the first paragraph Tom Bently reminds us how he kissed his Krups. He couldn't just say "coffee-maker," but he must share with us the upscale brand name of his coffee maker. How gauche can you get?

Some words that immediately popped into our mind when we devoured this collection of short stories that dishes out our obsession with foods: Tasty. Terrific. Totally fat-free. The 55 well-written, well-seasoned tales here, drawn from the pages of various magazines and best-selling books, as well as original works, take us from Fiji to France, the Amazon.com to the Big Apple. Jeffrey Tayler encounters the pain of post-Soviet Russia in a humble sausage. Robert Strauss nibbles on a potato chip and experiences an exercise in Zen meditation. Jonathan Raban goes nuts s he discovers people eat squirrels in Wisconsin. David Lansing's cheese-smuggling confessional. Betcha you can't read just one!

How can you resist a book that includes an essay about the wonderful experience of eating one potato chip? I finished reading these essays in a jiffy and still hunger for a new collection of essays about food as good as this one.

What happened? Christina used to be so nice to Sterling, but when Sterling didn't behave perfectly, Christina became an absolute brat! And the old characters are gone.....grr! Really, the new authors should study up on the old generation so they can make it accurate. As for Christina's attitude, if she were a little gentler with Sterling...But never mind. If you like jumping, read it, but it isn't that great if you're looking for the old Thoroughbred characters.

Ok, This book was pretty good-i love the jumping books, but i love the racing so much more! I got a thoroughbred book for christmas one year (the forbidden stallion)And i loved it...so i went to my library and took out A Horse Named Wonder (Makes sense to start at the beginning right?) and i loved it...it really got me into horses and horse racing....now i take horseback riding lessons, competing in my first show soon, and am thinking about being an exsersice rider....the books with Christina are ok, but what happened to cindy, max, len, tor, sammy,mandy, and everyone else and their horses? These books are great-and we should not critisize thier authors (how would you like your work critisized?) but i really miss the racing books! Please go back to racing-alot of people would like it!

What happened to Joanna Campell?! First it was her. Then it was her and Karen Bently And now it's her and this other lady! They made the series with racing and now suddenly it's all jumping! An ocasional book on jumping is ok, but the seriesn is about RACING! Why'd Samantha, Max, Cindy, Tor, And all the other people have to go! They were Some of my favorite people. Why'd Wonder have to stop breeding, too?And Christina is such a brat! She traded Wonder's last foal! I didn't like the Townsends, but what happened to them? In my opinion, this series is going downhill. =(

Though this book appears to be true and sincere, it does little to address the issue of how the author actually "Made it through the Rain". I personally suffer from Panic attacks and Agoraphobia and I was hoping for advice of how to overcome my own anxiety disorders, This was not the case. While I could relate to much how the author describes this illness, it provides little insight into how to confront this disorder. This story may be helpful to provide information to people who do not have this affliction, but I found it to be of little use as a sufferer of this illness.
While I sympathize with Mr. Sterling, I personally believe that sympathy does not solve this illness. Understanding it more important than feeling sorry for yourself and asking for the pity of others. I've have also lost much to Panic Disorder... If you do not understand panic disorder, buy it. If you have Panic disorder, it only provides more dark emotions and a cycle of failures.

I shared his book with two other individuals who know I suffer from agoraphobia and panic disorder before I read it myself. Their feedback was stating nothing more than this is another try to get rich quick through book writing, once again, to impress his family.
I have now finished the book and while I could relate to many of the inner feelings, the book offers nothing but self pity for the author. I bought this book hoping to make it "through the rain" myself. I read it and found the book severely lacking in any type sugestions other than strong-arming others into feeling sorry for you. If your depressed and want plently of excuses for people to feel sorry for you, this is your book.

If your looking for a positive approach to deal with Agoraphobia, this book is a waste of your money. This same disorder has cost me much myself, including the purchase price of this book...

It isn't necessary to understand or agree with everything in "I Made It Through The Rain" to gain new wisdom and hope from reading its story, and from the honesty and courage of its author. This is not "the true story of Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia", it's the truth about one man's journey within the disorder, and within himself. His truth, because it is told in its raw reality, brings out the truth in the reader, and leads to hope, and toward one's own path "through the rain". I took only one break during the reading of this book, to attend a chat group for agoraphobia. The story holds the reader's interest beautifully, and Robert Sterling inspires almost despite himself. (Only the editing could have been improved, so I give it 3 stars. Content is 5 stars.)

Sterling's science fiction is characterized by a keen appreciation for social forces and the increasingly intimate realtionship between things seen and unseen (the latter being anything from genetically tailored microbes to omnipresent cultural agendas). In "Tomorrow Now," his first book-length nonfiction work since the dated but fascinating "The Hacker Crackdown" (a tome on computer crime and digital culture written in the Internet's infancy), Sterling envisions the trends, technologies, and mutant ideologies that will define the first half of the 21st century.

"Tomorrow Now" is Sterling at his chatty, global-headed best. He writes about the future with skill and heartfelt exuberance, avoiding the perils of dystopian science fiction. Readers expecting biotech holocaust or maurauding robots will probably be disappointed in Sterling's close-to-home approach. But for readers into the political ramifications of computer networks, "ubicomp," and postindustrial design philosophy, "Tomorrow Now" delivers in spades.

The future, in Sterling's eyes, is merely an alternate way of looking at history. As such, it's an artifact of our own desires and creative stamina: a perplexing realm where "dystopia" and "utopia" blend and ignite with incandescent results. True to his science-fictional visions, "Tomorrow Now" is both laugh-out-loud funny--read his commentary on the pervasive techno-ecology of pseudo-organic "blobjects"--and grimly cautionary. "Tomorrow Now" unveils a world that thrives off future-shock, held together by neobiological systems and threatened by greenhouse catastrophe. Along the way, we meet angst-ridden clones, digitally savvy terrorists, and our own posthuman descendants.

"Tomorrow Now" is imminently readable, thoughtful, and soundly structured. Required reading for postcyberpunks and curious bystanders alike.

This is about today, of course. As every science fiction writer knows, any futuristic venture, either in fiction or nonfiction, is an extrapolation from the present. How prescient the writer is depends partly on how well he understands and observes the present and on how lucky he is. I don't know how lucky sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling is going to be as a visionary, but he definitely has a keen insight into the present. To use his words, "the victorious futurist is not a prophet. He or she does not defeat the future but predicts the present." (p. xvii)

I have read recently, Pierre Baldi's The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (2001); Howard Bloom's Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000); The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century (2002), a collection of essays edited by John Brockman; Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002); Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999), and others; and I can tell you this is as impressive (in its own way of course) as any of those very impressive books, and has the considerable virtue of being beautifully and compellingly written in a style that is polished, lively and sparkles with deft turns of phrase and a cornucopia of bon mots and apt neologisms. Furthermore, Sterling really is a visionary of the present in that he sees connections and developments that most of us miss. Here are some examples:

"The sense of wonder has a short shelf life." (p. xvii)

Speaking of SUVs and cross-training shoes: "Modern devices are overstuffed with functionality..." (p. 81)

"The right wing wants to leave the market alone but to regulate sex. The left...[tolerates] domestic license but wants to regulate private industry." (p. 160)

"...[F]oreign investors are entirely indifferent to...[the] phony-baloney national mythology" of any given country. "They may feel very ardent about their own country, but they won't tolerate any pretension from" someone else's country. (p. 162)

"Garage sales became Ebay." (p. 224)

Speaking of the abundance of "giant armadillos, sloths as big as hippos, three kinds of elephants," etc., and other fauna in North America before humans arrived: "A natural Texas would look like the Serengeti on steroids." (p. 270)

On what is causing the glaciers to melt: we are "digging up fossils...and setting fire to them." (p. 279)

"The actual likelihood of people...getting atomically bombed is much higher today than it was during the cold war." (p. 260)

On the human-caused "extinctions, and the sheer air-borne filth that comes from burning fossils": "It will...[transform] the whole Earth into something like a grim mining town in East Germany, only without frogs." (p. 281)

Sterling sees the first "superbaby" as a very sad creature indeed because it will be superceded almost immediately by a superior version, and then by a super-superbaby, and will be superior only to its "moronic parents." (p. 30)

"Blobjects...are computer-modeled objects manufactured out of blown goo." They "tend to be fleshy, pseudo-alive, and seductive..." Some examples: "the Gillette Mach 3 razor. The Oral-B toothbrush... The Handspring Visor PDA. Gelatinous wrist rests. The curvy, slithery Microsoft Explorer mouse..." (p. 75)

In addition to "blobjects" there are also "gizmos" which are "small, faddish, buzzy machine[s] with a brief life span." A computer is a gizmo. There are also "blobject gizmos." (p. 89)

And on and on. What Sterling is really writing here is social criticism. He is revealing us to ourselves by highlighting our technology, our consumerism, and the way the various economic and political players--governments, corportions, terrorists, NGOs, etc.--are all out to manipulate us to their advantage. His take on what he calls the dichotomy between the New World Order (the technological haves who are able to effectively manage information) and the New World Disorder (blighted areas of the planet taken over by terrorists, drug dealers and other high risk takers) is especially interesting. He sees the weapons of the unconventional warfare that is now, and will continue to be, the norm in a revealing way. He notes, for example, that terrorist-induced plagues, sometimes called "the poor man's bomb," will only lead to the "poor man's doom" because "Areas with organized governments and public health systems will be the last to collapse from germs and viruses, not the first." (p. 262)

Sterling's vision is of the postmodern world giving way to the posthuman. He sees the disadvantage of our becoming part machine and part biologically-enhanced beings: we will "still have some kind of everyday treadmill" to negotiate, and we may even acquire a renewed respect for death. (pp. 299-300)

In the final chapter he touches on the notion of a "Vingean Singularity" (from Vernor Vinge) which is a place in the future "impossible to describe, simply because" we as human beings "cannot comprehend" such a posthuman environment. In other words, like the event horizon of a black hole, the singularity allows no communication between us and that future world, and that it why it is called a singularity. (pp. 295-296)

Bottom line: be not dissuaded by the nay-sayers about this book, who may not like the unnecessary use of the extended metaphor from Shakespeare's As You Like It, which Sterling uses to frame the text ("All the world's a stage..."), or who are put off by Sterling's sometimes paternal and self-centered expression. This is a terrific read. I enjoyed it from first page to last and found myself nodding in agreement and surprise with much of what he writes.

Paradigm-shifts can stick in our collective craw like jawbreakers in a goose-neck. Galileo's carpet-pull on Ptolemy was no amateur-hour prank, and Darwin trumping Yahweh left a cantelope-sized goiter that still makes religious fundies bark and fume. Earth-shaking, yes, but taking decades, sometimes centuries to evolve their total, terraforming, reality-torquing impact -- slow-flying dreadnaughts of cultural metamorphosis whose meaning and trajectory still won't let us sleep at night.

Sterling's question is: What happens when the winds of change start storming the reality-studio at supersonic speeds? When whiplash upgrades seem to convulse the Zeitgeist every other minute? When dimensions start spinning like nerve-cells in a centrifuge, when ontology itself becomes as fluid as the global market? Leaning into the stormwinds of these queries, *Tomorrow Now* is less a bland Tofflerian forecast than a smoking flak-helmet pocked with the dents, scars, and impact-profiles of paradigm-shifts concussing like hot shrapnel.

"Apocalypse is boring," as Sterling likes to say, the last-ditch noctuary of the evangelical, the helpless, the neo-Luddite, the future-shocked. Better to encounter futurity with all the Olympian resources of the secular visionary imagination, with conceptual thaumaturgy and high comedy, with new languages to be learned and created, new disciplines picked up and dropped on the fly, a new world racing a hairsbreadth ahead of social and environmental holocausts that have always accompanied technological innovation....

But hey, enough of my hero-worshipping agit-prop, here are some snapshots from Sterling's globalist Bazaar of the Bizarre:

BIOTECH: Let's learn a lesson from our ancestor and brethren, the prokaryote -- let's pay homage to the two pounds of living bacteria that all humans carry within. In the microbe-literate society of the future, the elasticity and survival-skills of the bacterial swarm will make human cloning look like "a simpleminded stunt"(27) by comparison. Genetic engineering will heal the sick, fortify new deadly viruses, darken and transfigure every certainty, pump ontological coolants into the icy elysium of the posthuman. When evolution is reverse-engineered, becoming another stock-option in the industrial market sweep, Homo Prometheus will tap into genetic realms of unprecedented freedom, complexity, beauty, disfigurement, and terror.

EDUCATION: Whisked and pummeled by constant change, traditions will corrode, protocols will deliquesce, and canons will bloom with rot like beached whales. Fields of learning and praxis will ooze squishily from discipline to discipline, producing a steady stream of dynamic hybrids to stay on top of the market. Cultural memory will become like Leonard in *Memento* trying to reassemble and deploy his rapidly obsolescing past, swimming inside of whirlpool of innovation, competition, ecological catastrophe, and an elephant's graveyard of accumulating dead tech.

DESIGN: When things start to think, when domestic objects "love" you, when Shopping starts to look like Art and Philosophy, "visionary materialism" becomes a tasteless euphemism for a phase of cybernetic immersion that would have given McLuhan the spins. We will all be owned by our machines the way tribal peoples feel "owned" by the horizon, by the regenerative landscape of moon and tide, river and mountain, animal and insect. (In case you mistake my tone, this is not a "good" thing. It is simply inevitable.) We will all be passionate, obsessed fetishists. Think of the current ubiquity of cell-phones and telecom gear, and multiply it a thousandfold, in every direction. Trying to write "predictive" science-fiction in this maelstrom of voices and priorities will be like trying to set up a house of cards inside a wind-tunnel.

WAR: Cocksure superpowers trying to net a swarm of locusts in Fourth World zones run by pirates, drug-runners, mercs, ethnic-genociders, and cold-eyed Arab theology students jumping from wreckage to wreckage in the transnational narco-arms bazaar. Just think Belgrade, Kabul, Chechnya, Baghdad, and Mogadishu on crack. And the Third World zones of controlled anarchy embedded in every First World technocracy.

LAW, BUSINESS, POLITICS: Will there be much for governments to do in a post-ideological world, where public policy simpers beneath the windfalls of corporate underwriting, where human rights become a browser plug-in, where success and happiness is sold in terraced upgrades to graduated bidders? Will lawyers and legislators and police superstructures be installed as ornamental horticulture, migrant tenants surfing the crest of technology's raw, surging power? Will a democratic electorate retain its passion for activism and involvement, or will we vote with our money, our investments, our channel flipping, our site surfing, our zodiac of recorded purchases and credit histories?

DEATH: Sure, the Atomic Age may have decked us out in a cozy, suburban Cold War where mutually assured destruction and commie witchhunts could guarantee rigid cultural identity, war-fever eschatology, and a sober sense of imperialist mission (in short, the technocratic inheritor of Judaeo-Christian End Times), but where's the corporate payoff in that? Why not treat human mortality as another marketing-scenario to be spun, merchandized, glossed and sold? But if Sterling is right, our species may, in the end, "outsmart itself to death, [if] human knowledge is...not compatible with human survival"(264). We've burrowed too deep and too greedily into the planet to give birth and sustenance to our machines. Every species lost in the quest to infect the ecosystem with our ubiquity is a piece of the planetary survival-plan that's been irretrievably eroded by our narcissism, our fear, our all-too-human frenzy for mastery and technique, our Faustian gamble with machine-interface....

All in all, Mr. Sterling puts the Zeit in Geist, and *Tomorrow Now* has enough Plutarchan zing, erudition, and vervy wisdom to keep you buzzing for weeks. Some awesome riffs here. Kept me on tenterhooks throughout. Highest recommendation.

--for Ian Vance

Black Globalism: The International Politics of a Non-State Nation is inspirational. The quality of Sterling Johnson's writing, the depth of his research, and the coherence of his argument, all demonstrate with absolute clarity that someone, somewhere, is prepared to publish your old undergraduate essays. Perhaps the biggest disappointment with this book is that it fails to explore the subjects and issues suggested by its title. Instead, Johnson's text mostly offers a series of essays chronicling the lives of a number of African American men and documenting their involvement with national and transnational political organizations. The overall thesis of this book is somewhat unclear, but Johnson appears to be trying to argue that throughout their history, African Americans have possessed and demonstrated a Pan-African consciousness, and that in more recent times, as individuals and as members of African American organizations, they have attempted to influence US foreign policy.

Black Globalism is divided into three sections. Part one, entitled "The Roots of Pan-Africanism", contains two short chapters, the first of which attempts to explore the "Spiritual Roots of Pan-Africanism". Johnson begins by making the bold assertion that "Slave ships became the incubators of slave unity across the cultural lines which divided them in Africa. The shared experiences erased barriers between one group and another and fostered resistance thousands of miles before the land of enslavement appeared on the horizon" (p.3). The only evidence he cites to support this, and other similar strong statements about the early life and thoughts of African American slaves, is to refer briefly to a couple of slave songs which, he claims, "contain psycholinguistic evidence of the African slave's longing for freedom and Africa" (p.5). Johnson then goes on to describe a number of slave revolts which, he claims, were motivated by a sense of "African nationalism" and demonstrated that "diverse African peoples" were cooperating in their struggles. The final section of this chapter contains a brief description of African American relations with native American Indians.

This first chapter is fairly representative of the rest of the book. The bulk of Johnson's material, and his analysis of it, is clearly drawn from secondary sources (which, to his credit, he cites freely). Most of the first part of the chapter, concerning the early history of African American slaves, is drawn from Sterling Stukey's Slave Culture (1987). The second, concerning the early 'evidence' of Pan-Africanism and/or black Nationalism, is taken from Sterling Stukey's The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (1972). The third, documenting the importance of slave revolts, comes mostly from Robert Starobin's Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (1970). Finally, the last section concerning "African-Indian Alliances" (which seems to have no relation at all to the rest of the chapter), is a two page summary of William Katz's article in African Commentary entitled 'America's First Rainbow Coalition' (1990). In effect, the entire first chapter, like almost all that are to follow, is a patchwork collection of summations of other peoples' work and ideas, cobbled together in order to support Johnson's thesis.

The second chapter focuses on the repatriation debate during the 18th and 19th centuries. Johnson documents the lives of early African American pro-repatriation activists such as David Walker and Edward W. Blyden, and organizations such as The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, who campaigned to allow African American slaves to return to Africa. Johnson also discusses the response of other African American organizations, such as the Colored People of Ohio, and individuals, such as Frederick Douglas, who vigorously opposed repatriation. This chapter is far more cohesive than the first, but it still draws heavily from secondary sources.

The second part of the book is entitled 'Individuals as Global Actors'. It is comprised of seven chapters, each of which contains a biographical sketch of an African American man whose political activity included some sort of international dimension. The figures Johnson chooses to include are Martin Delaney, Bishop Turner, Chief Alfred Charles Sam, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey and Malcom X. Many of these chapters are fairly short and merely paraphrase more extensive biographical texts (and sometimes he even uses the same title for his chapter as the book he is summarizing). For example, the chapter on Martin Delaney appears to be a recapitulation of Victor Ullman's Martin R. Delaney: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (1971), and the chapter on Bishop Turner relies exclusively on two works written in the late 1960s by Edwin Redkey. Although the chapter on DuBois also draws extensively from secondary texts, it stands alone in the book as the only chapter where Johnson has referred in depth to primary sources. Perhaps because of this, his treatment of DuBois's involvement with the international activities of the NAACP, and the Pan-African Congress, is fairly informative and represents the best work in this book.

The third and final part of Black Globalism is entitled "National Organizational Level International Actors" and represents an attempt to examine the international/foreign policy activities of contemporary African American individuals and organizations. Of the four chapters in this section of the book, only the first two, "African-American Organizations and US Foreign Policy" and "Congress and African-American Foreign Policy Influence", possess any real substance. The first of these documents the anti-apartheid activities of organizations such as the NAACP, the African Liberation Support Committee, and the All Afrikan People's Revolutionary Party. It also discusses the formation of TransAfrica, established in 1981 in order to influence US foreign policy toward Africa and the Caribbean. "Congress and African-American Foreign Policy Influence" focuses on the activities of the Congressional Black Caucus, established in 1971 and a number of African American Congressmen, such as Charles Diggs, one-time Chair of the House Subcommittee on African Affairs, and George Crockett, one-time Chair of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, who have been actively involved in trying to influence US foreign policy. Of the two remaining chapters, the penultimate one merely restates, in condensed form, a Nation article by Bruce Shapiro called 'The Department of State: Formal Organization at the State Department' (1996) which explores the State Department's supposed record of institutional racism. In the final chapter, entitled "African Americans and the Global Economy", Johnson spends most of his time comparing the economic status of African Americans to that of other Americans, and to black people living in England. Somewhat perversely, the global economy is mentioned nowhere other than in the title of the chapter.

Almost everything about Black Globalism is a disappointment. Johnson's writing ability is well below acceptable; his assertions and generalizations are overstated, over-simplistic, and rarely supported by any documented evidence; and his logic is consistently flawed and/or difficult to follow. Often, his analysis seems to be motivated by a desire to elevate and advance historic African achievements beyond a level which is currently plausible to most historians. For example, he argues that "The Africans of antiquity, especially the indigenous Egyptians and the Ethiopians, had attained a high level of civilization and were in fact the progenitors of European civilization. Europe had progressed mainly because of its embrace of Christianity (an African religion originating in the Ethiopian Coptic Church), which was essential to the highest forms of civilization . . . . The natural characteristics of Africans as gentle and hospitable race enabled them to respond to the altruistic ideals of their European religious mentors without being infected by their actual greed and hypocrisy" (p.10), or "[Martin Delaney] drew upon his ethnological studies to prove that it was ancient Africans' intellectual achievements of civilization from which the Europeans had borrowed to assume their global hegemony" (p.44, my emphasis).

At a more conceptual level, at no point does Johnson attempt to define what he means by "Black Globalism", nor, particularly, by the term "Non-state Nation". He does not explore, nor even consider whether membership of this "Non-state Nation" is assigned or imposed by race, place of origin, ethnicity, heritage, personal choice, external power, or whatever. Indeed the concept of race itself is never considered or questioned, nor for that matter is the concept of the state, nor the nation. Benedict Anderson's ideas about the nation and nationalism, which would have been an interesting addition to any discussion about the formation and cohesiveness of a "Non-state Nation", are never mentioned .

What other academics see as problematical or worthy of investigation - race, the state, the na

the book is obviously not written for novice readers, but the ideas are great. It is about time quality researchers have stopped to look at race as one of the variables in globialism.

This book really stinks big time. Its a load of cyberwanking buzzword hauling. The accompanying record though has some underground low tech garage studio charm to it.

'All that is solid melts into air'... description of advanced capitalism by Marx. These words are a good description of how our media landscape transforms the meaning of anything... Arthur Kroker in his book and CD 'Spasm' give us the sound and insight into this 'meltdown' taking place all around us. Like Marshall McLuhan, Kroker asks "What haven't you noticed lately?" Kroker goes ahead and tells you, from biotechnology to music sampling, he hangs on a point of view - before it melts...

Bruce Sterling's introduction to Kroker's 'Spasm' is worth the price of admission alone, it's short, but sets the tone.

You will not always agree, but you will think, not many books or CDs that do that these days. Give Kroker a spin.

Seeing this set of quilts displayed in a gallery is a rich experience for lovers of textile arts. The companion book can not replicate the experience of viewing these richly decorative pieces, but if you can imagine the colors twice as intense, and the playfulness of the many beads, charms and sparkles sewn onto the quilts popping out at the viewer, perhaps you can forgive that they are nearly imperceptible by comparison in the book. See the exhibit when it comes to your area, and use this book as a reference for techniques you may not be familiar with.

Add another to the list of frustrated puzzle solvers !!

I have enjoyed logic puzzles ever since I was first given one in math class in 8th grade, so when I recieved this book as a Christmas present this past Christmas, I was excited to dig in and rub my brain cells togeather.

Unfortunately as two other reviewers have mentioned, I too have found that this book has a good deal of errors to it.

While I admit that no author should be expected to be perfect, the point of a logic puzzle is to logically deduce withheld information to come up with the answer to the proposed problem, however this becomes impossible when not enough information is given to begin with and the reader has to jump to a conclusion, and merely hope that it is the same conclusion that the author made. I found an example of this in problem number P3-1a last night, which led me to write this review. Hopefully in the future the author will take more care in the puzzles he creates to make sure that they actually have a solution!

I give credit to the book for being a fairly large compliation of logic puzzles (I love solving logic puzzles). Volume, variety and interesting story/scenarios are the reasons that I gave the book 3 stars instead of 1 star.

But the book is FULL of errors. Some are typos with little impact (mention of a "yellow" serpent when all of the logic statements refer to a "blue" one). Others are typos with heavy impact (failing to put a "not" in one of the logic statements, discovered by looking at the "solution").

But more significant are the logic errors. Norman draws conclusions that are not valid from the info that he provides. Usually, this centers around exclusion cases. Often his puzzles have multiple "correct" answers, but he fails to address other possibilities in his "solution" or he provides a basis for eliminating them that is not logically accurate. P2-3 is an excellent example of that.

I also have one of Norman's False Logic Puzzle books and it is beleaguered by the same problems. He needs to find a capable person to go over his work before he publishes it.

All in all, it's a good book if you are looking for a bunch of puzzles to solve and you are comfortable knowing that you are right and the book is wrong if the puzzle as stated has multiple or no solutions. I.e. if you just plain don't need the "solutions" in the back of the book to solve the puzzle or verify your solution.

It was such a great premise for a book-- what if the Babbage had realized his analytical engine and successfully created computer much earlier in our history? It was also encouraging that two of my favorite writers were involved. Unfortunately, _The Difference Engine_ never really delivers on its astounding amount of promise and the resulting book, while readable, doesn't hold together terribly well.

Three sets of very different characters' lives intersect when they all come in contact with a mysterious box of punch cards. Mix in an alternative history, lady Ada Babbage (with echos of Moorcock's Gloriana), and a staggering richness of detail and you have the book itself.

Unfortunately, it often felt like a huge amount of talent in search of a plot. The detailing was perfect, the characters were great, but the story just never came together.

Too bad.

i really like reading gibson. usually, it's kind of like running a marathon: it's harder than hell to get to the end, but ultimately rewarding. this one was both an easier read than i expect gibson to be (of course, he had help writing this one) and not as rewarding in the end.

set in victorian england, 'the difference engine' is an alternate history: what would have been changed had charles babbage's mechanical computer been a practical reality? i VERY STRONGLY reccomend that the person interested in reading this book do some research on the times and concepts before starting this book. you will get a lot more out of it if you know what's going on before you start. this is probably one of the worst failings of the book: while the background is richly detailed (there is a wealth of victorian slang, social moires, and lifestyle), the basic concept of what the hell a difference engine even is is never explained.

the story is apparently about a mysterious series of computer punch cards falling into the hands of a series of characters. the characters have only loose connections with each other, and once the story moves on to the next character, the plot threads are left dangling open for the previous one. just what exactly the punch cards do is never revealed, so the ending of the book feels rather anti-climactic.

the concepts and ideas are interesting, but basically the tale never goes anywhere. you keep reading, hoping that there is a point to be made, but the whole thing just kind of fizzles out. "steampunk" is a fun and original idea, it just doesn't completely work here.

In contrast to most of the negative reviews, I thought the suprise ending was powerful and not entirely unexpected.Though this book is science fiction, its way of leading up to the suprise ending is similar to the stratigy used in the movie "Sixth Sense." Both start out slow,yet lead to powerfull endings which are foreshadowed with tantilizing clues.This last means that both stories should be seen more than once in order to be better understood.The Difference Engine is, thus, a complex story that requires an open mind and multiple readings in order to enjoy.

Even though there are a lot of pages in this book, the number of concepts covered is extremely small. This would be better titled "Pre-Algebra for Dummies"; in fact, you'd be hard pressed to pass an Algebra I class with the material covered in this text. While it is friendly, there are other friendly books that cover a wider breadth of material. I cannot recommend this book.

This book does have problems, the lack of exercises being a major one, but it isn't totally useless. It does explain some fundamentals of algebra in very easy to understand language and contains simple examples. I found this good for getting the basics down. I started with "Algebra The Easy Way", but found that it would give simple examples and overly difficult exercises, which only succeeded in frustrating me.
I would suggest Algebra for Dummies as an absolute beginners book which should be used along with a slightly more advanced text with exercises. One can always make up his/her own exercises as well.
Remember, this is a "Dummies" book. How much can you really expect?

This book does not present numerous problems for one to work through. BUT it does explain all the essential concepts of algebra so that a person will not only understand the steps taken in working out a problem, but will have a firm grasp in understanding most everything related to the entire subject. This is a great supplement to those who are learning algebra for the first time, or those who have largely forgotten it.